


apres moi le deluge

by smallblueandloud



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Asexual Natasha Romanov, Character Study, Creating An Identity For Yourself Out Of Nothing, Multi, Non-Graphic Violence, Red Room (Marvel), be the nat content you wish to see in the world and all, i am nervous about the bw movie. so i wrote this, more specific tws in the author's note, tw for child!natasha doing murder and handling guns, tw for just... the entire red room. all of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:22:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23864467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smallblueandloud/pseuds/smallblueandloud
Summary: Natasha’s story is not one of happy endings. Natasha’s story is not one of a woman who learns to be normal. Natasha will never be Sharon Carter, for all that they have in common: growing up under stories of war and loss and victory. Both traced careful fingers over the casing of guns when they were eight years old.But Sharon was supervised, carefully, by her Aunt Peggy, who let her look for five minutes after a day of good behavior, then shut the safe and asked about dessert. Natalia was supervised by an instructor she had never met before, who picked up the gun and showed her how to hold it, how to store it, how to aim it between a man’s eyes.(or, natasha romanoff, where she is today, and how she got there)
Relationships: Clint Barton/Laura Barton/Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	apres moi le deluge

**Author's Note:**

> two fics in two days?? i'm just as surprised as you are. enjoy this, because the muse is definitely acting weird these days. this is kind of the spiritual successor of [the landslide will bring it down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23472094), my OTHER fic about nat and her training and how it defines her. check it out, if you're so inclined :)
> 
> there's also a kind of prologue to this story, which can be found [here](https://smallblueandloud.tumblr.com/post/616499780981522432/so-this-doesnt-fit-in-the-main-fic-consider-it). tw for adult!lila being an assassin and murdering people, although they're all bad people.
> 
> title is from "apres moi" by regina spektor, because that song is the most perfect nat song in existence. see the end note for the detailed content warnings (because spoilers).

This is the story of a girl. This is the story of a woman who picks up the pieces of the girl she once was and chooses to keep the wreckage that was bequeathed to her. The Red Room took in a scared orphan, made her into the best spy that ever lived, and was surprised when she destroyed them.

Never let it be said that Natasha Romanoff does not trust easily. Natasha will trust easily for years and years, at least with those who deserve to be trusted. Her instincts were carefully trained for decades. She can walk into a room and read the mood at a glance, see a betrayal coming from miles away. Actors good enough to fool a Black Widow are already on her radar.

(She vets her acquaintances, of course, but it’s approximately a hobby to her. She only starts putting effort into vetting people when she gets married, and even then it’s only those around Laura. She doesn’t think anyone could be a real threat to her or Clint.)

(It takes her until the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. to realize the price of her arrogance.)

This is why, when out of options and trapped in place, she takes Clint Barton’s hand. It was the middle of the afternoon in a busy city. At the time, Natalia had not been sure what she was doing, or why she was doing it. But Clint Barton has never projected anything but sincerity. When he wants to take you down, he tells you so, even if he’s undercover and you’re too blind to see it.

“It’s only sportsmanlike,” he says to Natasha, whenever she turns her nose up and warns him that he’s going to get himself killed. Clint always has a big grin, his body language relaxed and open. It takes Natasha too long to realize that he’s doing it for her benefit, at least in the beginning - no need to make the twitchy assassin twitchier.

Natasha knew who to trust and who to be suspicious of. This is something the Red Room taught her. The Black Widow will never suffer a betrayal until Phil Coulson calls her in the middle of an interrogation because her partner has been compromised.

Natasha, too, can afford to be betrayed. It’s usually an unpleasant experience, and one notable time she ended up having to drag Steve Rogers behind her while catching her balance. But very few people are good enough to catch her through her miles of contingency plans and seventeen safehouses. These skills are something the Red Room taught her.

Natasha can suffer betrayal and walk out the other side. Natasha can become anyone, say anything, go anywhere. Natasha can keep up with aliens and gods and Tony Stark with a decade of training and a modified, weakened serum in her veins. She and Steve Rogers have more in common than he will ever know.

The Red Room did not break Natasha Romanoff. They gave her the tools to raze them to the ground, and then to defend her partner, her team, and her world. This is not to say that she does not suffer because of them. There are several close calls. Sometimes, she loses sight of who she is, who she’s working towards being - who she wants to be.

Sometimes, something will happen during a fight - her opponent will say something, or do something, or twist their wrist the way her instructor always did - and she will lose control, revert back to being a puppet. She and Bucky Barnes have as much in common as he will always know.

But the important thing: Natasha Romanoff pulls herself out of that state, every single time. She places her trust in the people who will give her a hand. Girl falls into hole, girl climbs out of hole, girl takes the hand of a freshly hired S.H.I.E.L.D. operative on a rainy day in Europe and lets him help her out of the hole her life has become. Girl makes herself whole, or as whole as she can ever be. Natasha will never fully relax, and she’s accepted that.

This is the story of a girl. This is the story of unmaking, of making, of claiming yourself and stealing back what you cannot create. Natasha Romanoff has always liked sweet things since the childhood she cannot remember. Natasha Romanoff likes puns because she decided she did. Natasha Romanoff has a family, has spouses, has children, has a team. Natasha Romanoff is every inch of what the Red Room made and so much more.

This is the story of a girl. This is the story she writes about herself.

* * *

Natalia’s first fight had determined whether she got into the Red Room program. Well- “got into” isn’t quite the right wording, makes it sound too tame. This wasn’t a college entrance exam, with essays about “significant challenges”. Two girls walked into the fight. One walked out.

Did you think they hired the instructors for their creativity?

Instructors in the Red Room needed three traits: obedience, ruthlessness, and skill. Many were themselves graduates. Only a select few were allowed to see the bigger picture.

(Later, Steve Rogers will question orders, and Natasha will stop and stare at him. _What is wrong with you,_ she will want to say. _You are not allowed to see the bigger picture. Don’t bother asking.)_

(When S.H.I.E.L.D. falls, Nick Fury will have kept Natasha from the big picture for almost twenty years. She will retreat back to Europe and dig up files, and files, and files. Files on HYDRA, yes, but files on her past as well. Pictures of young girls, blood on their hands. What was the bigger picture, what was happening. What else is she missing.

Once, she trusted Nick Fury. Once, she trusted S.H.I.E.L.D. enough to ask questions and be satisfied by their answers. After the fall of the Triskelion, Natasha draws her circle ever closer, and spends hours keeping tabs on everyone she has ever known.)

During her first fight, Natalia stared into the eyes of the girl in front of her and knew they couldn’t both walk out of that room. She made the choice.

Count: one. Strangulation is not particularly creative or glamorous, but it gets the job done, especially for little girls who don’t know how to kill.

She was seven years old.

* * *

Natasha’s story is not one of happy endings. Natasha’s story is not one of a woman who learns to be normal. Natasha will never be Sharon Carter, for all that they have in common: growing up under stories of war and loss and victory. Both traced careful fingers over the casing of guns when they were eight years old.

But Sharon was supervised, carefully, by her Aunt Peggy, who let her look for five minutes after a day of good behavior, then shut the safe and asked about dessert. Natalia was supervised by an instructor she had never met before, who picked up the gun and showed her how to hold it, how to store it, how to aim it between a man’s eyes.

(It took _four months_ of good behavior for them to let her learn how to use a gun. She was only allowed to advance past it, to knives, when she’d used it to kill one of the other girls.)

(Count: two. Killing someone with a gun is less personal. Natalia, late at night, is not sure if she prefers it. Later, Natasha will resent it and be grateful for it in equal parts. She will hide guns all over every place she ever lives, except around her children, and run her mind over their locations to steady herself.)

* * *

This is the worst part about Natasha: she loves her work.

She doesn’t love killing people, of course, although she will never quite be able to banish the quiet feeling of satisfaction at a job well done. She has never enjoyed visiting death on people. Too much childhood trauma, probably, no matter what the Red Room tried to train out of her.

(Every time she wakes up with a nightmare, it feels like a victory. _Look at my morals, Madame,_ she thinks wryly, in the dark, Clint and Laura’s soft breathing around her. _Look, Mme. No hands.)_

But knowing the weaknesses of everyone around her, fighting someone from the top of her game, slipping into the skin of a stranger: these she is proud of. These she _enjoys._ It’s terrible, loving the tools that they gave her, but they are all she has, forever and inescapable. A hard mission can make her forget all the traits she’s chosen, all the things that take her closer to humanity, but she will never lose her instincts and her skills.

Think back to a test when Natalia was fifteen years old. They had masked the girls and tested them with each other, had them become each other and get close enough to hurt another. Only one kill was allowed that session, and it had been Natalia’s.

Count: nine. She hadn’t relished the kill - she was old enough to understand the permanence of death, and to miss a sister of seven years. On the other hand, she was too good to get particularly attached. The death hadn’t bothered her too much.

But the method. She had stared at her hands, afterwards, in amazement. Becoming someone else opened a whole world of possibilities. _This_ is what being a Black Widow is.

It’s terrible, but she’d lived for the lessons they gave her. She had _enjoyed_ them.

Going undercover is still her favorite kind of assignment. This is not something she decides about herself - this is one of the indelible facts about the person she is, and the girl she once was. Before Phil Coulson calls her “kidnappers” to tell her that her partner has been compromised, she is having the time of her life.

* * *

They teach Natalia, when she is fourteen, what her body can be used for. They teach her at sixteen how to walk, talk, stand so that men will want her to use it.

At eighteen, she is sat down and warned that sex is a distraction.

For her marks, this is what she wants it to be. This is how she will get information and push their guard down far enough to do what she needs to.

For her, though - it will get her killed. It does not matter how skilled she is. Even if she manages to survive the mission where she lets it steal her attention, the instructors will make sure she does not last the night.

It doesn’t matter how valuable of a weapon she is. It never has, really, and Natalia has known this all of her life. She is replaceable in a way that the Soldat never will be, because the superiors learned their lesson with him.

The Black Widow, then, does not allow sex to distract her. This is the most obvious symptom that she will ever show. Many will miss the knives she keeps on her person, the guns she hides in every room she spends time in, the way she becomes a new woman when she walks into the coffeeshop. Only two people know how slippery the idea of _choice_ becomes when she is tired, when she is in danger, when something has gone wrong. Only she knows how bare she is on the deepest parts of her soul.

Anyone close to her can notice how Natasha refuses sex.

This attitude is understandable to Clint. Natasha hesitates to tell Laura for months, worried that this will be the final straw that prompts her to go find a normal person living in San Francisco and biking to work at a tech startup.

But it isn’t. Laura, for all of her shaking hands and nearsightedness, is fundamentally a good person, and more importantly she is an intelligent person. Trauma that does not hurt anyone is not the final straw. It is not any kind of straw. She’s in this for the long haul, she says.

If Natasha has any regrets over this, the one thing she truly feels the Red Room stole from her, she never admits it, even to herself. She has found the capacity to love, to relax (cautiously), to defend. To make her own choices. Losing this one thing is easy, compared to that.

* * *

Natasha and James Barnes have an agreement between themselves.

As much as they have common experiences, at heart their training was very different. The Winter Soldier had his memories and his identity beaten out of him, one day at a time. Natalia was a blank slate raised to have the deadliest bite a human being could have.

Strangely, Natalia was always more rebellious. Though it was never much of a contest. She was allowed to think for herself because it made the Black Widow more effective. She has always been dangerous because she could adapt to the circumstances, because she knows how people ticked. No one can see her coming, no one can stop her, no one can keep information from her. Natasha remains a precision instrument, who - even at her most compliant - was a danger to her handlers in ways they could never predict.

Setting the Soldat on a mark was more like bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. Effective, yes, but usually with far more casualties than necessary. He didn’t need a brain for that, just muscles and mission parameters burned into his memory. Much easier to control, even if it took heavy weaponry.

On the other hand, James’ deprogramming was surprisingly straightforward. Once the memories were unlocked and the withdrawal symptoms faded, Bucky Barnes emerged. Wracked with guilt and untrusting of his own hands, healing is a process that he’s still working on, but at least he has a personality to return to.

Natasha has to build one from scratch. She never had a conscience, never had a life she lost. She is playing at normal, most of the time, and her presence is still profoundly unsettling for almost anyone she drops the mask around.

James is one of the only people who understands this about her. They don’t talk about how he trained her or the missions they ran together - Natasha knows he doesn’t remember much, but the KGB had gifted Hydra footage of him working to persuade them to buy their most devastating weapon, and Steve has told her, quietly, that Bucky has watched every minute of leaked footage.

(Natalia had been in some of the videos. She wasn’t part of the deal - but always good to keep the enemies on their toes. Remind them that you can destroy them whenever necessary.)

James made her who she is today, just as Clint helped her piece herself together and Laura trusted who she’d become. They don’t speak about it, but she knows he knows. She doesn’t want to remind him of their terrible past.

She’d guess that he still feels guilty. What she doesn’t know is that he doesn’t know what to say to her.

Still, they get through it. She calls him James without fanfare (the only one who uses his legal first name to his face). He will never call her anything more familiar than Natalia (still worried about the seventeen-year-old whose windpipe he could have crushed in a moment of inattention during a spar). She, still, has never beaten him in a fair fight. Both of them remember this.

The Winter Soldier never left survivors, but Natasha survived her encounter with him, protecting an engineer who stopped being relevant a month later. She had remembered his existence, jumping in front of her assignment because that was the only thing that would stop him, but not his face until Steve Rogers recognized him in the middle of a Washington, DC street. The drugs the instructors had her on ruined her ability to remember many details afterwards, to protect themselves.

(Not that it saved them in the end. The Black Widow doesn’t need a face to track down a mark, especially one high-profile enough to help command the Red Room project.)

She’d known his handiwork, though. She recognized it again when Nick Fury flatlined on a S.H.I.E.L.D. hospital bed.

A life goal: to rescue those taken by the same monsters that made her into who she was. The Soldat had spared her life when she’d put herself between the engineer and his gun. She’s not even sure if he recognized her. It’s not like protection detail was what he was used to seeing her do. But somehow, in the deepest parts of his mind, he chose to injure, not kill.

She does not fool herself into thinking it was an accident. She has never beaten him in a fair fight.

No matter what happened - because they will never know, because Natasha could not see his expression and James has no memory of the mission - she remembers it. She owes him two life-debts. First, for the breath in her lungs; second, for the training that is still the bedrock of her personhood. They didn’t speak much during their captivity, but she knows he never held himself back for her the way he did with the other girls. That was enough - she can take Steve Rogers, can take anyone bigger than her or stronger than her, because of his mercy.

Small mercies. Odd mercies. This is one of the things that Laura does not understand, that Clint only sees in passing like a flash on the horizon. But she knows it, and remembers it, and knows herself for it. Knows him for it.

There are quirks of James’ that only Natasha will ever recognize. The wordless signals developed by the KGB, based vaguely off Russian Sign Language, were used for determining an asset’s status. Sometimes, from the other side of the room, he will sign _all clear_ without meeting her eyes. Once in a while, when he’s having a hard time, he’ll let her know from the midst of dissociation. Natasha knows that _backup requested_ means to go get Steve. She always does, without a word of explanation, and then slips away to places unknown.

She understands what he’s doing, even though she will never do it herself. It’s his way of accepting her, acknowledging their shared history. It’s a call for help, a show of vulnerability that’s more meaningful than any teammate has shown her. James is still giving her herself, giving her pieces of her own history that she would have tried to leave behind.

The Red Room gave her the ability to choose herself. It never truly gave her the ability to choose to leave _it_ behind. She doesn’t regret this, mostly because it means she will never lose her ability.

But her relationship with James is another reason.

* * *

Natasha is not Sharon Carter. Natasha will never stop watching sight lines, counting exits, cataloguing her weapons in the midst of a party.

There is no ending to this. There is only infinite balance, in a life where there was once nothing but excess. Kill your enemy when he jumps at you. Catch your child when he jumps to you. Not knowing the difference means losing your life - or losing worse.

Love is for children, Natalia learned, but Natasha is faster and deadlier than she ever was. A Black Widow mothers death, which is lucky: Natasha has a lot she would kill for.

Balance on the knife’s edge. It was never hard for Clint, no matter what his family history might’ve suggested, because his instincts have always been to protect. Clint is a marksman. He relies on instinct much less than people would expect. Natasha has watched him slow down time, sitting in a stakeout: watch, aim, pull between heartbeats. It’s almost too slow for him - ordered to hesitate, he might start rooting for the guy.

But all of Natasha’s fighting has been trained into her as instinct. Any time she learns to tussle with Cooper gently, to run slowly enough that Lila can keep up, it feels as though she is dulling herself, ruining all of the work that has molded her into who she is.

Maybe she is. Maybe this will be what kills her, a hesitation, in the crucial moment of a fight. But she is the Black Widow, the best of the best. If she dies for her children- well, there are worse ways to die. And she knows she will never truly leave these instincts behind.

Learn to balance, leave behind excess. Natasha does not get drunk, but the Red Room taught her to drink if the mark was drinking. Money, sex, beautiful women - most of her marks from then had all three.

This is why she didn’t bat an eyelash when ordered to shadow Tony Stark. She is not to bed him - standard orders since Fury and Clint first made eye contact over her shoulder - or kill him - probably a good thing, as Pepper Potts would find some way to do the impossible and make her _pay_ \- but she is still familiar with this assignment. The most familiar assignment. This is what she was made for.

More or less. Natasha is not used to assignments that last this long with no violence involved. She can’t sleep with Stark - who is so tied up in Potts that she doubts he would even want to, if she offered - but she has to be his friend.

She is a killing machine, one who does not let strangers touch her, but she has to laugh at Stark’s jokes and allow him into her personal space. Not unlike when Cooper had first learned to walk, and Natasha had needed to let him drape himself over her lap and drool on her papers.

Excess, excess, excess. Stark thinks he’s reaching for too much, and maybe he’s right. But she was taught to kill anyone who recognized her callsign and to shoot those who got too close.

Maybe Natasha is the greedy one here, reaching for love, to Clint and Laura and Cooper and Lila and Nathaniel. It is more than she deserves.

But this story is not about happy endings, and her family is not perfect. Clint has been by her side for so long - whatever she chose to do under S.H.I.E.L.D., trusting them to guide her true, Clint was there next to her. Laura wakes up from nightmares sobbing, and never asks them to do more than she thinks they can, even if she needs to.

Natasha will never stop sizing up every person she sees. This is not bad. She always trusts easily. She will never be caught by surprise by the man behind her in line for coffee. But Natasha will never be able to retire, never be able to relax. Her former handler - her old friend - will go to Tahiti with the love of his life to die quietly. Natasha will never know the peace that Phil Coulson did, during those few weeks.

But no one’s life is a happy ending, not really. Just because there is no happily ever after does not mean that they aren’t happy.

Natasha marries the loves of her life in the woods. They have three beautiful children. Eventually, she will teach her only daughter the skills she should not be proud of. Her eldest will study the politics of superheroes, teaching students at Columbia. Her youngest son, named for her, will become a carpenter, and will pretend not to recognize the name _Clint Barton_ with a smile like he’s hearing an inside joke. He will call them on Sunday nights, like clockwork, for all of the years he lives apart from them.

This is not a loss. She does not regret the sex she will never have. The Red Room has not stolen this from her, some mystical life where she laughs sincerely at large parties and teases anyone other than those who would take a bullet for her.

This is remaking. This is making. This is who she is, where she comes from. She chooses her own skin, threadbare as it is, over becoming the woman on the television. She steals bits and pieces of Pepper’s mannerisms for the Stark assignment and then lets them go. Maria Hill never expects anything from her besides silent commiseration and a late-night drinking buddy, and Natasha finds that that is exactly what she wants to be.

Steve laughs at her fossil jokes and tells her he trusts her. Sam offers her anything he owns - food, a hair iron, burner phones - and sees her as a person. She and Tony reach an accord, a friendship of sorts, in which she gives him glimpses of the depths of what she knows and he never asks her for anything.

Clint slows himself down to watch her. Where the mask of _Natasha Romanoff_ has holes, he asks quiet, probing questions, and teaches her more about herself. Laura holds her hands, her heart, her deepest secrets, and loves her for who she is.

It is enough. This is the best ending Natasha can get. It is not an ending, and not a beginning, but all the bits in between. This is what she chooses. And this is what she gets.

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: children forced into combat, children murdering other children, violence, strangulation mention, guns mention, knife mention, children handling guns, brainwashing, drug mention, dissociation mention (but no description), blink-and-you-miss-it mention of blood. there is no sexual violence (graphic or mentioned) in this fic, although nat is ace because she was trained not to want sex. this is a fic about violence, but there's no graphic violence in this fic. take care of yourselves, y'all, and let me know if there's something i should add to this list.
> 
> come check me out [on tumblr](https://smallblueandloud.tumblr.com) where i am very willing to yell about natasha romanoff all day every day. leave a kudos or comment if you're so inclined :) i hope you're doing okay in these weird-ass times, and i wish you and your family health.


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